


In the World to Come

by newredshoes



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Brooklyn, Gen, Jewish Character, Jewish Identity, World War II
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-21
Updated: 2014-05-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 22:42:42
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,895
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1665191
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/newredshoes/pseuds/newredshoes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Barnes was never a Jewish name before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In the World to Come

**Author's Note:**

> The MCU Howling Commandos needed a Jew, and Sebastian Stan has such a [good face](http://newredfic.tumblr.com/post/86448517986/wish-fulfillment). For the concerned, this story includes brief encounters with period-appropriate ethnic slurs and antisemitism, as well as implied, canon-compliant medical torture.

The last two joints of the middle right finger of Emanuel Sokolof were thin air. When Bucky was 8, he and Steve became the first kids to ask him if he really kept the severed part in a box.

Sokolof, the butcher on Bedford near Marcy, blinked down at the two boys from behind his counter. He was a big man, a shtarker, the one who lifted the unfurled Torah scrolls. He wasn't yet 30, but with his broad shoulders and bushy beard, he seemed much older. "You want to see it, I suppose," he said at last. At this seeming confirmation, Bucky's face lit up, while Steve looked queasy but undeniably fascinated. Sokolof studied one, then the other: big-cheeked and dark, little and pinched.

"Tell me," he said, and he leaned upon his forearms. "Why would a man do such a thing? The finger's gone, what use is it to me now?"

Steve looked at Bucky, who stayed silent. "I don't know, sir," Steve answered.

"You." Sokolof pointed at Bucky. "You should know. They teach you anything?"

"Not at my school," Bucky said, more disappointed at lacking severed limbs in his education than theology.

"You should look into some additional schooling." The butcher folded his hands. "I'm not going to show it to you. For one, it's private, and for two, it's at my apartment, and I've got to look after my shop so Pasternak doesn't think he runs the place."

Joe Pasternak, his business partner, was a cousin of some sort. Customers came from blocks around to listen to them fight over stories and law. Just then he was in the back with the rabbi, each inspecting the newest meat.

"I'll tell you why I keep the finger," Sokolof said, and Steve and Bucky both held their breath. "I want it buried with me when I die, so that in the World to Come, I might be whole." He lifted his eyebrows.

Bucky knit his brow. "You don't have it."

Sokolof drew himself up to his full height. "You calling me a liar?"

"You lied to us. I bet you buried it already."

The butcher smiled. "And why would I do that?"

"I don't know." Bucky shrugged, defensive. "We just do. They buried Mrs. Hirsch the same day she died."

"A kop oif di plaitses," he said approvingly. "Tell you what, if you go find my finger's headstone, I'll tell you the truth of how I came to lose it."

Steve's eyes went wide. "Is there really a headstone?"

Bucky snorted and tugged on his sleeve. "Come on, he's pulling your leg."

They were halfway out the door when Sokolof shouted after them. "Hey! What kind of a goyische name is Barnes, anyway?"

*

"No. I don’t—no. You're serious?" Morita pulled a face. "You don't seem like it."

Bucky wagged his eyebrows. "Oh yeah. It was Barnewitz back in the old country."

"That sounds like bullshit to me."

"You'd be amazed how often it works," he said cheerfully, and readjusted his hold on his gun. The sun didn't make it far into the dense forest on either side of them. Poland, it turned out, really was quite a picture.

Morita was still frowning as he marched. "But I've seen you eat pork. Or whatever that shit the Army feeds us is."

He shrugged. "Gotta eat." Then: "Wait, what the hell would make me 'seem like it'?"

"You got me. What's the test? Do I drop a penny?"

Bucky snorted. Morita scratched at the scruff underneath his chin. "It just always sounded like you should be able to tell," he mused.

"Nah," said Bucky. "I'm a stealth Yid."

"Not that stealthy!" Dugan called from across the column.

"What do you know, you big mick?" he shouted back.

Dugan barked a laugh. "Hey now, Cap'll hear you!"

Bucky smirked. "I dunno, boys, we got all these experts with us. Why don't we ask them?"

Every sour-faced member of the SS unit under escort kept their eyes straight ahead.

*

"Every Jew in central Pennsylvania looks like me," said Katzman, a weedy Litvak with a broken nose. He was the most interesting thing about Camp McCoy. There wasn't so much to do in Wisconsin besides smoke (if you did) and train, or if you got a moment, to jerk off. Talking shit was the next best thing.

"You make it too easy," Bucky laughed. "Too easy."

Bucky's company wasn't neighborhood kids. He'd noticed it right away, all these guys who just weren't like him. He made friends with the Smiths and the O'Haras and the Williamsons; they were good fellas, and he was himself around them, but assumptions got made until he said something. Katzman stuck out like a sore thumb. They had nothing in common — he was a farm kid from the middle of nowhere — but Bucky surprised himself, needing another Jew like this. Growing up in Brooklyn, you think you can make do with everybody.

Katzman snorted around his cigarette. "So tell me, tell me," Bucky continued, still chuckling. "Let me guess. Your options were to marry your sister, or to throw yourself into the welcoming embrace of the Army?"

"She's my sister. You tell me." Katzman gestured at his face. "Would you want to look at this all night in the marital bed?" Which just about broke Bucky up for good.

"Something funny, fellas?"

Barnhart and his two hangers-on were there out of nowhere, him glaring down at Bucky and Katzman, who were just innocently sitting on a low wall. Barnhart was from Ohio somewhere, and somehow he'd taken offense at Bucky coming first in the alphabet.

"You fellas seem like you're really laughing it up," Barnhart said, hackles raised. "You laughing at us?" 

Bucky blinked, all innocence, and switched to English. "At what? I'm sorry."

"Know what I think?" Barnhart's lip curled. "Sounded kinda German if you ask me."

Katzman sighed. "It ain't German, you cracker dimwit."

"Why don't you calm down, Barnhart?" Bucky crossed his arms and lifted his eyebrows. One of Barnhart's buddies put a hand on his shoulder, but he shook it off.

"I don't think some smart New York slum kid should be telling me to do anything."

"That's funny," said Katzman, who pointed to Bucky. "Because he's a sergeant, and you're, what, private first class?"

"Hey. Come on." Bucky patted him, pushing him back; then, to the sidekicks: "You boys wanna get your boy together?"

"Sergeant," Barnhart sneered. "Ain't no real sergeant who's hiding behind a rifle sight."

"Listen, pal." Bucky spread his hands. "If you want to fight, we don't have to dance like this. I save that for the real ladies in my life."

"What're you saying?"

He shrugged. "I'm saying you're not classy."

The crowd didn't even have time to gather. Barnhart went down so fast and so hard, there was already nothing to see. Bucky fought to end the fight; that was how he'd always done it.

Barnhart's two buddies hauled him away. They would knock Bucky down to private for this, but only for a little while. "Jesus," said Katzman, whose cigarette hadn't yet reached the filter.

"I don't think we're allowed to say that," said Bucky, who smiled as he shook out his fist.

*

It was Steve who was so hot to enlist, so Bucky agreed they'd go to the station together. It was a year now since Pearl Harbor, and Uncle Sam might have loosened his standards a little. Steve thought he had a chance.

Bucky had to admire him for it; part of him even wanted to want service like Steve did. He knew what he knew about war, though. He knew and he liked his good life in Brooklyn. Still, like Steve, his dad had been a soldier, even if he'd only died in some dumb home front accident. More and more he felt his father, his other past, pressing on him.

Anyway, half the neighborhood was gone already, and if that was the reason Edie Nezvitsky was finally giving him the time of day, he didn't want to win like that.

They called his name first, B before R, so he promised he'd wait for Steve while they finished his paperwork, and then off he went into the examination. The army doctor looked him over, took down his measurements and asked him some questions. He made approving noises after the eye exam, and offered Bucky $50 more a month to join the paratroops. Bucky and Steve had agreed on regular Army, though, and that had seemed right for both of them.

"You're Jewish?" the doc said, flipping through his papers one more time. "Barnes?"

He frowned. "Yeah."

The doctor moved past his surprise. "You can elect not to have that on your dog tags, you know."

Bucky sat up a little straighter. "Why not?"

The doctor thinned his lips. "You've heard about what happens if the Germans capture you."

"They can try that," he said, and smiled.

It felt strange to dress himself again and walk out in civilian clothes. Already they felt like a false front, the wrong show of who and what he was. He'd planned for so long on not being a soldier, but if he had to adapt, at the very least he'd prove it wasn’t a mistake.

Steve was just sitting there on a bench in the corner, swimming in his jacket, glaring at the floor. Other guys, big guys, got called up and into the room. Bucky's insides twisted up. It hadn't occurred to him, obstinately, that Steve wouldn't get in at all. Which was stupid, considering all the years Bucky had known him, but he was so confident they'd at least see how smart Steve was, put him in intelligence or in an office somewhere. 

He couldn't even joke on the walk back to their apartments. He'd come for moral support and gotten mixed up in this war all alone.

His sister cried and cried when he told her. "Bucky," she said, finally. "There are these words you gotta say, if it's the end and you've got time. Mom taught me. Do you remember?"

The prayer felt big and solemn in his mouth, breath in his body that he hadn't known to welcome.

*

He didn’t know much, but he knew this: The world is broken. Always has been. There’s a crack that goes right down the middle, and that’s how you know you’ve found the center of all things. No one person can fix it, but every person ought to try as best he can. You just pick that stuff up. No one taught you. You just know.

*

"Bucky." Steve, pleading with him. "Come on, you need to sleep."

He had no answer for that. Bucky kept on walking. He'd walk all the way back to Sicily if it got him far enough away. He'd walk out of his own skin if it made him feel like himself again.

"Bucky." Steve took his shoulder with a too-big hand. "The others need to rest up."

"I'll meet you at the line, then," he snapped, but he slowed to a halt. He wasn't the only one who needed to be taken care of. Hydra had held 400 of them at that place, and for longer than he'd been there, too. He opened his mouth, not even sure what to say yet, but his customary sightline for Steve was now squarely in the middle of his chest. When he looked up, it was still Steve's face, as concerned and worried as ever, but unsettling, augmented, not quite right.

They'd done something to Bucky, but damned if he knew what. He wasn't bulkier or bigger and he sure couldn't rip his own face off, but if all that came of that time in Zola's chair was not being tired—

When Steve had told him about volunteering for this thing, Bucky couldn't look him in the eye. If Steve hadn’t stepped up, someone else would have become Captain America, and maybe Zola would have still needed subjects. He'd laughed all through Steve's USO stories, and ruthlessly teased him about the uniform when he finally took off the jacket, but those things had felt like aftershocks, nonsense bubbling out of Bucky without his input. Something cold and humming stayed behind while his giddiness ran its course; he didn't know how much of that was left.

Steve was still watching him. "Can you help me?" he said. "We've got to keep everybody safe."

"Yeah," Bucky said, and nodded. "Okay."

He shifted the rifle slung over his shoulders. The strap bit into his neck. His hands shook.

*

In Azzano, it came. He needed six words. They were just six words; he’d bowed his head to listen while Becca sounded them out. He couldn't remember them, not with men disappearing in blue flashes all around.

He huddled in the convoy that bore the prisoners off, wide-eyed, trying to string them together. Tanks, then shouting, then rounding up. All those rumors, _elect not to._ Just six words. Hebrew, but his. Prisoners of war. Six words. Azzano.

All that came to him was _What are they gonna tell everyone?_

*

He lived hour to hour with those stories curdling inside him. Everyone in Brooklyn knew somebody: Mr. Nieman, who went into debt trying to get his family visas; Mrs. Khazan, no word from her sister in Kiev since September of '41; Hannah Baum, with a penpal trapped inside Warsaw.

The other prisoners were all scared too, but mostly they were offended. Bucky couldn't relax, couldn't breathe, couldn't slip up. If the Hydra goons barked German at them, he pretended not to catch their drift. If the guards looked like they were snatching volunteers, Bucky faded into the crowd. Katzman swore up a blue streak at one supervisor, in English; they put him to work with the big cogs. He'd been crushed to death under a part they still shipped off to Central.

Whatever weapons they were building in this place, they scared the hell out of Bucky. He worked because he needed to eat, and he needed to eat so he could get out. This wasn't anything he was equipped to fight; in the face of a cannon that obliterated bodies before they fell, one man could make precisely zero difference. Bucky went through the motions of thanking God that the Army never took Steve and never would.

"I'm going looking," he said one night to the other guys in his cell. "There's gotta be some way to get out of here."

"And go where?" Gabe whispered.

"It didn't take us long to get here. The line can't be more than a couple days' march."

"Assuming the line has stayed put," said the British guy, Falsworth, who hadn't smiled yet.

The Frenchman exploded, a cluster bomb of words only Gabe could understand.

"I don't care," Bucky snapped, not waiting for the translation. "I'm not sticking around here. We don't have to stay where they put us."

Dugan, who wasn't asleep after all, peered out from under the brim of his hat. "You're a dumb kid, Bucky, but good goddamn luck."

*

The little man in the suit, Zola, the first thing he did was grab Bucky by the jaw. His fingers were small and clammy as he examined him. Bucky fought against the gag, and wrenched away from the hand. "Hold still," Dr. Zola snapped in his fussy, accented English. Bucky twisted his wrists in their bonds, glaring.

Dr. Zola only smiled and turned back to his colleague. "This one will do?" he said, in German.

"I hope it’s not ready yet," the other man, in uniform, grumbled. “This one needs a lesson.”

"Are you just sore that he took out two of your men?" said Zola lightly. "Or that he escaped detection more cleverly than any other American?"

A scoff. "He could be anybody, if your procedure works."

"Yes, but it's good when they're special. Do you like what you hear, Sgt. Barnes?"

Bucky forced himself to start breathing again. A chill lingered on his face where he'd been held.

"He is listening," said Zola. "Did you know he can understand us?"

The other man sneered. "You are wasting it on him, even if it kills him."

Zola tilted his head. "Oh?"

"Look at him."

Zola did. He peered at Bucky, scanning him head to toe with his hands tucked behind his back. Bucky could have kneed him, right in the sternum, if he hadn't been tied down. 

Zola smiled again, without showing his teeth. He looked Bucky right in the eye. "Then the joke will be on Hitler, won't it."

The other man curled his lip.

*

Pain that did not numb, pain that did not ebb, pain that only changed, poison pain, chemical pain.

They did not gag him, because he could not scream, only pant for breath while Zola took notes.

*

There were words he was supposed to say, if the end came and he still had time.

Name, rank and serial number.

Name, rank and serial number.

Name, rank and serial number.

Name, rank and serial number.

A hand on his shoulder. A face above his.

Name, rank and serial number.

His name.

His name.

*

Bucky's sister saw him in a newsreel and wrote to ask why the cameras couldn't catch him smiling. On a rare trip back to London, he and Steve made her a Voices of Victory record; halfway through the two of them giving each other a hard time, Bucky broke out "The Star-Spangled Man" while Steve begged him to stop. ("I can't help it; it's just so catchy," he drawled, and whistled the tune until their time ran out.)

"That's not going to wind up on the radio, is it?" asked Steve as they dropped it in the mail.

Bucky snorted. "You think my own family would inflict that crap on the world?"

"You would."

"Yeah, probably."

London wasn't New York, but it sure was something. Here they were just two more American GIs clogging the place up, and nobody bothered them as they went walking. Everything they did in Europe, Bucky tried to keep it there. The present moment was all he needed: the pigeons, the maze of streets, the easy way Steve carried himself now. He knew how to do this. He could do this for a little while.

Back at SSR, they had debriefings to sit through and reports to file. Steve, all apologies, vanished with Stark almost as soon as they got there. Bucky waved him off. Hang around here long enough and someone would find some meeting for you to be in.

"Sgt. Barnes. Thank you for coming."

He always straightened when Peggy Carter came to handle him. "Ma'am," he said, innocent and wry. She raised her eyebrows and led him to a private room.

"Still no dancing?" he asked as he took a seat.

"Stop it," she said, flat as ever.

"I didn't mean with me." He didn't wilt under her unimpressed look.

"Sergeant, I'd like to confirm this report of company action on the 27th of last month, please. If you would."

Bucky folded his hands. "That's Hranovnica?"

"Correct."

"Sure. On intelligence passed on to us by SSR, the company suspected that two Nazi scientists were meeting with Hydra to defect to Schmidt. We found the marks under heavy guard, with a substantial perimeter of entirely Hydra troops. After a firefight and an effort to extract, led by Captain Rogers, we fell back when all marks were found to have died during the attack."

Carter tucked her pen between two fingers. She paused before she spoke. "Could you describe how the marks came to be deceased, when the mission was to capture them alive?"

"They posed an imminent threat to company members."

She waited. Bucky sat; his trigger finger tapped against the table. After Hranovnica, as they'd hauled tail away from the ruined resort lodge, his rifle on his back, he'd thought about his other family, all those martial Midwestern Barneses, and wondered if they'd recognize this, if now they'd know what to do with him.

This stuff, it was just detritus, leaking skulls and broken backs and throats cut through with wire. Someone had to do it, and it might as well be done for love. It wasn't for so long. He could accept being the one who was followed for that.

In Europe, he did such things.

*

God, but he loved; _God,_ he was so wild for Ruthie Szabad. Her mother called him "that no-good shaygets," and her father barely let him wait in the doorway, but Ruthie wouldn't have none of that. He'd spotted her at a dance, her outrageous hips and big eyes, and she caught him looking and nodded him over with a laugh. She was a bookworm and a wiseacre and the worst liar he'd ever met, next to Steve. She lived in Manhattan, the Lower East Side, and he rode the F train at all hours, thanks to her.

They almost got serious. One day his mother had been dead for three months and the younger kids were all out until evening, and she came to Brooklyn at last; at 21 he had a girl in his own bed for the first time. Bucky curled around her on his narrow mattress while she lay with her back to him, flipping through the books he kept piled on the floor. Her hair always smelled so good. He found stray red-gold hairs for weeks after she left.

"It won't be warm for much longer," he mumbled, in Yiddish, against her shoulder blade. "You ever been to Brighton Beach?"

"Not yet." She turned to smile at him. "Am I missing much?"

"Lots of water. Lots of sand. Worse hot dogs than they got at Coney Island." He rested his chin on her shoulder.

Her mouth did that funny quirk he liked. "When do you want to go?"

"You free Thursday?"

"Who's free on Thursdays?"

"Bums, mostly," he said, and she laughed as he kissed her again.

"I can't," she said when they pulled apart. "It's the new year, remember?"

He hadn't — he could never remember when the holidays changed around so much. "Over the weekend, then." Ruthie hesitated; he tried to decide how far out the Indian summer would last. "Next weekend?"

"That's when I've got to atone," she purred, and rolled him onto his back. "You could come with me. We'll feed you real good for the first one."

"Ah." Bucky grimaced. "A new year's no time to start something big."

"You don't believe that." She ran the tips of her nails lightly over his chest. "Why not try putting both feet in?"

He lifted the sheets. "Did I climb in bed with your parents too?"

"Just me, Bucky." Something earnest was coming when she bit her lower lip like that. "The world being what it is, don't you think it's important that we show up?"

There was a whole life there, that he could have wanted and made.

God, he was wild about her. He wouldn't let just anyone ask him those questions where he couldn't hide.

*

The story was this, and he never much thought about it: Bucky never learned the prayers and he never went to shul, but he knew to kiss some doorways, to never blow out some candles, when not to eat bread or when not to eat at all. (He ate anyway. It's no sacrifice if you're always hungry, so you might as well eat.) Some lessons got into him deep and unspoken. Leave things better than you found them. Save a life, save a whole world. Justice and the law, the real stuff, the big stuff, was what made you a better man. Do everything now, because it's not about Heaven.

Once he heard that one man in every generation is born with the potential to be the mashiach, to bring about the World to Come. You can't take that stuff literally or seriously, but Bucky got something from that story, that when you find a good person, you fight as hard and as dirty for his goodness as you can.

*

Somehow, before the whooping cough that laid him up the winter of '31, Steve had never read _The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn._ By the time he finished, the book was giving him ideas.

"You've got a whole actual second family," he insisted from under his too-many blankets. "We should go find them!"

"What, ride the rails like a couple of hobos?" Bucky couldn't help but laugh.

"We could do it," said Steve, both wry and hopeful. The tips of his fingers looked bruised with cold, resting on the book jacket.

Bucky leaned back in his chair and crossed his arms. He didn't quit school that year so he could bring Steve his homework every day. "Okay," he allowed, "granted, it would be fun right up to about Parsippany, but after that, where're we going, fearless leader?"

Steve really was guileless. "Don't you have an address?"

There had to be one. Somewhere out there were a whole bunch of other Barneses: uncles, aunts, cousins, grandparents. They all probably went to church and ate chicken dinners on Sundays. From time to time, sure, he wondered what they were up to; he'd be a very different guy if he'd stayed there with them. He remembered the army base in flashes, life with both parents, and even what cornfields and empty Midwestern roads looked like. But then his pops died, and his mother brought them to Brooklyn, and there was just no use pretending otherwise. What did he want that wasn't in New York?

"Nah." 

"Just like that?"

He shrugged and pulled a noncommittal face. "They don't want to see me."

"Bucky." Steve's shoulders drooped. "What does that mean?"

"I dunno. Mom used to send them pictures, report cards, never heard anything back. What do you think it means?"

"All the more reason for us to go," Steve insisted, and for a moment Bucky felt his heart curl into a fist. He thought about heading Steve off at the pass, describing in lurid detail how Pearl Liebeskind had let him up her shirt the other day, or letting him have it about being too old for this kid's stuff, or even just pointing out the obvious, the fact of Steve's body wracked beneath those blankets. Steve had to be too smart to make him say the other thing, to remind him of that single letter he’d fished out of the trash. _Our son made mistakes, but he has been dead. You and your children, who reject the Church, are no concern of ours._

"Come on, Little Nemo," he said instead, and grinned. "We could go anywhere in the world and you want to start with Indiana?"

*

Quiet was a signal to find something to do. A snowstorm in the Alps was excuse enough. Falsworth, Morita and Gabe fiddled with the radio; Dernier muttered over a found device he was dissecting; Dugan polished his boots. When downtime came, Bucky cleaned his gun. He knew his sniper rifle inside and out, all the pieces and all the ways they worked together. They took good care of each other, and knew how each was best used.

"Hey. D'you have a minute?"

Bucky nodded at the other crates nearby. Steve pulled up a box and sat close, knee-to-knee. "Phillips thinks Zola is preparing to come through here,” he said quietly, calmly. “A stringer spotted an unmarked high-speed train near Gdansk less than an hour ago. Jim found a good interception point, maybe 20 clicks away."

He didn't look up; his hands kept moving. "You want to stop him?"

"They want us to capture him. I want you with me on this one. Gabe too."

He slipped the sight back into place. "Okay."

"Okay?"

"Okay, I'm not going lose my head and shoot him," Bucky said.

"I know," said Steve, who was a terrible liar.

After a moment, he smiled. "Hey, I was just thinking about that time at Lucille's on Lafayette — you remember that place?"

"By Vanderbilt? I remember the milkshakes." Steve's mouth twisted. "And running into the guy who'd just beaten me up behind it."

"That was a good moment, you and him and my General Sherman autobiography." He chuckled, once. "You really clocked him good."

Steve shrugged like he could still disappear into his shoulders. "Sorry again about those library fines."

"Not your fault the man liked tomato soup." Bucky set his rifle on his knee. Funny, to be back in Brooklyn, here in a shack in the middle of a blizzard. "You ever think about those guys?” he said, watching Dernier with his screwdriver and tweezers. “Finding them again and making 'em sorry?"

"No." Steve canted his head, like he'd genuinely never considered it, even if he hadn't had bigger things to do. A bad-tempered gust outside T-boned the wall behind them.

"No." Bucky laughed to himself. The mountain was already filling his heart, the high place in the snow and the black rocks where he’d wait. He returned to his gun, but stole another glance at Steve, who would get him there. "Me neither."

*

There were words he was supposed to say when he died.

There should have been words, but when they woke him, the words were thin air.

**Author's Note:**

> [Voices of Victory](http://www.collectorsquest.com/blog/2012/05/01/wwii-voice-mail/) records were real, and I'm sure this one would have ended up at the Smithsonian. I learned a lot about the proper [burial of limbs](http://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/281565/jewish/The-Interment.htm), [Yiddish vocabulary](http://kehillatisrael.net/docs/yiddish/yiddish.htm) (and its varying degrees of mutual intelligibility with German) and [Olam Ha-Ba](http://www.jewfaq.org/mashiach.htm) for this fic. The [prayer](http://www.myjewishlearning.com/life/Life_Events/Death_and_Mourning/Dying/Viddui_Confession_.shtml) Bucky can't remember is [the Sh'ma](http://www.jewfaq.org/prayer/shema.htm).
> 
> Many thanks to my excellent, wonderful team of betas and readers: Adiva, cheerleading from the start; Pho, who told me it needed to make better sense; Becca, whose line-edits and geographical help improved things immensely; and Kaydeefalls, who said it finally worked.


End file.
